]]>Fleet management may not sound like the sexiest industry in the world, but there’s no question that it’s a big one. There are 3 million long-haul truck drivers on U.S. roads today and they all have to report their driving hours to their dispatchers. Today they’re mainly creating those logs with pen, paper and fax machine, but a new Google Ventures-backed startup called KeepTruckin is trying to automate the process on the smartphone.

Fleet Management is one of the oldest mobile vertical industries on the books. Qualcomm may be know today for powering the guts of our smartphones, but most people don’t know it started out as fleet tracking company. Many of the fleet technologies out there, however, have focused on corporate problems – managing and tracking thousands of trucks and payloads – not on the truckers themselves, KeepTruckin co-founder and CEO Shoaib Makani said.

“We actually start with the trucker and solve the universal and acute problem of tracking driving logs,” said Makani, who left Khosla Ventures to found KeepTruckin and did stints at AdMob and Google.

KeepTruckin’s forthcoming Android and iPhone apps automatically track time and distance driven, generating log files, which automatically get sent to dispatch. It alerts drivers when they’re over federal-mandated driving limits, and with a driver’s permission sends real-time location data to dispatcher or fleet manager.

The app can be used in “single player” mode by an independent trucker looking to cut down on paper work – it will even generate a fax for dispatchers who still insist on getting paper records of fleet networks – but KeepTruckin is also creating a dashboard for fleet companies that integrates seamlessly with the app, Makani said.

“Because they are required by law to submit their logs to their dispatcher or fleet manager, the product is inherently viral,” Makani said. “The dispatcher gets sent logs from KeepTruckin repeatedly. Instead of just receiving them via email, we give the dispatcher a web dashboard where they can view their drivers’ logs, assign jobs, send messages, track location. It’s a bottoms up approach to fleet management – something no one has attempted.”

KeepTruckin has plans to move beyond drive logs into the more intricate details of fleet and truck management, including managing freight costs, automatic brokering of jobs, and dynamically priced insurance. The company raised $2.3 million in July led by Google Ventures.

]]>We only have so much time in a day, and the creators of a new mobile app called Aviate want to make sure Android-device users don’t spend it swiping through screens looking for apps.

Essentially, Aviate is an intelligent home screen disguised as an app. You download Aviate from the Google Play Store like anything else, but it’s designed to take over the usual start screen and simply the experience, Co-founder Mark Daiss explained during a recent call. Aviate overlays the stock Android home screen with a pared-down version that includes between six and eight of the apps you use most frequently. Elsewhere, it organizes your apps into different categories rather than just a long alphabetical list.

When you change locations, Aviate knows and will surface the apps and information you probably want while you’re there. It’s kind of like Google Now or even Siri in this regard, only it’s not an app or an alert that requires any action. Rather it’s the first thing you see when you turn on the phone.

So, say you’re in a sushi restaurant, as Co-founder Paul Montoy-Wilson — a former product manager for Google Play — was during a demonstration. Aviate will bring up apps such as Yelp and OpenTable, and includes buttons for taking a picture, posting an update or checking in. It pulls information from places like Foursquare and turns it into tips about the food, the experience and other factors you might find important.

When you’re driving, Aviate will bring up apps such as Waze or Google Maps, as well as automated buttons for getting weather or directions home. When you’re at home at night, you’ll get the next day’s meetings and weather, an alarm clock, and maybe a KIndle app if you’re into reading.

“[The app is] taking in all the inputs of our phones … and beginning to come up with the patterns we live in,” Montoy-Wilson said. “… We live in a world now where there is literally an application for everything we do and content for everything.”

Aviate must be solving a problem a lot of Android users feel is weighing them down. (I’d argue the context-recognition stuff is more useful than re-organizing the home screen or categorizing apps.) The company, which also includes Co-founder William Choi, a former search engineer at Google, has raised $1.8 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Capital. When Aviate released an alpha version in late June, it did so quietly and was expecting between 50 and 100 users, but someone put the download link on Reddit and the company’s servers crashed the first weekend.

The company had to start limiting how many people could sign up, but more than 70,000 have registers so far. On Tuesday, anyone who hasn’t been able to download it yet will get their chance to download the beta version, and they can invite five people apiece.

Over time, Montoy-Wilson said, Aviate should evolve from a relatively static experience into a more-personalized one. That means different users might see different apps and different functions when they’re in the same place, and rather than recommending apps based on what’s popular among all Aviate users, it could look to a user’s social graph or other sources. The company has brought on two machine learning engineers to help it make the most of the data it’s collecting and figure out how to use it.

Ultimately, Montoy-Wilson, said, the goal is, “How do we take this vision and really put the best social and communication experience on top of it?”

Donna is the name of a new iOS app that blends location services, calendaring, reminders and push notifications to embody an actual personal assistant that keeps your schedule for you. It was created by the four founders at San Francisco’s Incredible Labs: former Twitter product lead Kevin Cheng, along with Scott San Filippo, Arshad Tayyeb and Spence Murray, who arrived from Gracenote, DoubleTwist and Netscape, respectively.

Siri is a voice-powered assistant — you ask Siri questions about anything, from directions to making reservations for dinner. Donna’s creators are less focused on search; this app asks the questions and triest to anticipate what you need before you even have to ask what’s next on your personal schedule.

In developing the app, they talked to personal assistants, executive assistants, and people who employ them to understand the attributes that makes for a good assistant. They didn’t just pick a random woman’s name — the app is named after an iconic television assistant: Donna Moss, the assistant to the Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman on The West Wing — and someone they think reflects the best qualities of a person in that position: proactive, strong, intelligent, Cheng said.

“Good assistants seem to be people who, you ask them something, and they give the information back to you,” Cheng told me in a call earlier this week. “But really great assistants are the ones that are a step ahead of you and gave you the information before you realized you even needed it.”

In that way Donna shares similarities with Google Now — which is Android-only at the moment. That’s a search product, but it also uses location and user habits to anticipate what you want. But it doesn’t quite mimic the schedule-keeping of an assistant.

Putting an app to work for you

Based on all the stuff she does, it’s clear Donna is intended for really busy people — people who use an app like AnyDO or Wunderlist may see similarities, but with an added proactive element. It takes your appointment details from your phone’s calendar, uses your contacts, your location and the location of where you need to be next to tell you where and when you need to leave to make your next appointment on time. It cuts out fiddling with your phone to figure out directions, the weather or what’s coming next on your calendar.

It does other things to mimic a real human assistant too: you get a push notification when it’s time to leave for your next meeting; you get an update at the end of the day about what’s on the schedule for tomorrow; and if it’s raining at the location you’re heading too it’ll let you know to bring an umbrella.

But the app is designed so that you actually don’t spend that much time in it: you simply get a notification for what’s next (or a call, which is in the works). And in order to not be annoying it only notifies you with something that immediately needs your attention — time to leave, time to get on a Skype call or Webex discussion, time to wake up, etc.

From there it does a lot of work for you: swipe the notification for a conference call and it will not only automatically dial you in, it will put in the conference code and mute you as well — to mimic a personal assistant dialing you in.

The app is free and the company won’t have any ads in Donna — the info you share with your personal assistant should stay personal, Cheng said — but they do have a business plan in mind: subscription access. But that’s only if they can make themselves “valuable” enough someday to charge, he said.

Donna is launching in private beta starting Thursday, so you’ll have to sign up for an invitation. Cheng says he hopes to open the app to the public soon after.

]]>Nuance Communications is sticking its voice recognition technology into a lot of products, from its own smartphone and PC personal assistants to connected TV and cars. Though all of those devices share the same natural language understanding (NLU) technology, none of them are interconnected. You’re car doesn’t know what you’re telling your TV, which is equally unaware of the movie search you just performed on your mobile phone.

Now Nuance, however, plans to break down those barriers between its separate platforms, and focus on what it’s calling “intelligent systems.” The idea is to create a personal assistant that will persist beyond the interface, that can be accessed anywhere from the cloud, said Matt Revis, VP and GM of Nuance’s handset division. “We want to unify the personal assistance experience across form factors,” Revis told GigaOM.

As part of that intelligent systems effort, Nuance is trying to delve deeper into language in addition to broadening spoken language’s scope in a technology. Its NLU technology already understands context and idiom to a certain degree. But Revis said it is launching an initiative called Living Language that will allow its servers to dynamically update and speech databases to reflect changing language patterns as they occur.

“What you get is a very rapidly evolving language model, one that almost moves ahead of the zeitgeist,” Revis said. Living Language will get its first test not on Nuance’s voice platforms, but in its evolving predictive-text interface Swype. Nuance will use crowdsourcing to start analyzing new words Swype users type into their texts and emails. As new words and phrases begin trending, Swype will update its lexicon and make that new vocabulary available to its Swype apps.

Nuance launched the new crowdsourcing capabilities at CES 2013 on Monday, making them available in the latest version of the Swype Android beta (users will need to opt in to send data as well as receive dictionary updates). But Revis said the company plans to expand those capabilities to voice technologies. “We’re just starting with the keyboard,” Revis said.

The building blocks are already in place for that integration, Revis said. Most of Nuance’s products rely on a hybrid approach, using software on the device for simple voice commands, but reaching out into the cloud for more complex speech recognition features. The key will be moving the assistant itself into the cloud to sit alongside the enabling technology, knocking down the walls separating its now-distinct voice assistants.

A common voice for a common platform

Each interface will remain specialized to a certain degree. Your TV doesn’t need to understand the command “turn down the AC,” for example, but there will be a lot of crossover between platforms. For instance, we could use our TVs to update our social networks, and tell our phones to tell our TVs to record programs while we’re away.

Nuance also plans to do a lot of cosmetic work, creating unified themes for the app’s graphical user interfaces and a common set of voices and personalities for the assistants themselves. It’s imperative to create a common user experience to get consumers to embrace the idea of a universal voice assistant, Revis said.

Nuance will offer its universal assistant across its own Dragon products, but its primary business is licensing technology to hardware vendors – this will be no exception. Manufacturers like Apple, Samsung and LG sell across the consumer electronics landscape, making it possible for Nuance to bridge their TV and smartphone lines. Nuance also hopes to cross-license technology between vendors, so, for instance, a Samsung could partner with a Ford to ensure their TVs and cars use a common voice interface, Revis said.

As Nuance delves into more areas like the connected home and internet of things, there will be more opportunities to connect and interlink more devices. That’s where the potential of universal assistant could really get big. A talking washing machine or refrigerator might be useful, but a washing machine you could talk to through your smartphone would be even more useful.

Update: At CES, Nuance revealed two new customers for its Dragon Drive technology: Chrysler and ZTE. Chrysler will tap into Dragon Drive Messaging, speech recognition software that will allow driver to compose, send and listen to text messages using a voice interface. Chrysler is implementing the service in its new Sprint-powered UConnect connected car platform, starting with the 2013 RAM 1500 and the 2013 STR Viper.

ZTE isn’t building a connected car platform so much as its developing a hands-free system. ZTE will begin embedding an app in its forthcoming Android phones called Car Mode, which allows users to control of variety of the phones functions — such as launching navigation apps, playing music and listening to dictated text messages — through simple voice prompts.

]]>Mobile developers and businesses are increasingly getting the tools to embed Siri-like personal assistants into their mobile apps. Following the launch earlier this month of Nuance’s Nina, Angel, an interactive voice response provider is releasing its own mobile SDK for iOS and Android called Lexee, which will enable developers to voice-enable their apps.

Lexee actually builds off Nuance’s technology for online speech recognition and speech to text, so it’s similar in actual performance. The system is designed to help users accomplish tasks and interact using conversational speech. But Angel believes Lexee can stand out because of the ease with which developers can create their conversation flows and the analytical data that they can get back from Lexee.

Lexee uses a simple point-and-click system called SiteBuilder, a toolkit that Angel first developed for IVR and call center applications. It allows non-developers to easily apply voice to any customer interaction. Lexee will also rely on Angel’s analytics, so developers will get back information on how consumers are interacting with Lexee and where any problems might arise in conversation flows.

Angel President Dave Rennyson said neither Nina nor AT&T’s Watson, which also has its own SDK, provides that mix of ease of use and reporting. He said Lexee was used to voice-enable a Salesforce.com application in just four days. Angel, a division of MicroStrategy, currently has about 1,000 enterprise customers using its existing customer experience management tools including Best Buy, Pfizer, Barnes & Noble and Facebook. He said those companies could be interested in re-using some of their work and applying Lexee to their mobile applications.

Lexee is just another sign of how our future will be filled with voice-enabled personal assistants. Siri has opened a lot of people’s eyes as to how speech can be used to get at complex tasks and can be combined with other tools to make us a lot more efficient.

]]>Placeme for iOS and Android may be both the scariest and amazingly futuristic smartphone app I’ve seen yet. The free software uses every sensor in your handset to track your activities, location and environment. There’s no checking in or other action you need to take; Placeme, built by Alohar Mobile, simply records everything in the background. And that creates the fullest set of personalized data I can think of: Placeme is a complete personal tracking solution.

Obviously, the scary part is that the app essentially learns everything about you: Where you shop, your route to work, who you visit, etc. Liang says the data isn’t shared or broadcast and that it’s encrypted. Without question, this may be the most pervasive type of mobile software to date. But I’m inclined to agree with Scoble when he says this is the future. Whether we like it or not, the world is fundamentally changing due to the Internet and our ability to share information seamlessly.

If you can get past this change there’s the potential for a world of useful information. Liang mentions that the app could check your route home from work in advance to check for traffic. Or perhaps it can alert you that another gas station nearby has cheaper gas than the station you just pulled into. When the phone has this type of history, it can truly be a smart personal assistant.

Will people be willing to give up privacy for this type of help? Over time, I think so; especially with the younger generation that is growing up with smartphones, tablets and location-based apps. Like Scoble, I’m a sucker for anything that brings the future closer to me today, so I’ve installed Placeme for now to see exactly what my phone can learn about me. After all, the future is inevitable.

]]>Siri may be both the best and the worst feature Apple has rolled out for iOS yet. On the one hand, the beta product is fun and helpful. On the other hand, the software is exclusive to the iPhone 4S; iPads, iPod touches and older iPhones need not apply. The situation provides an opportunity for developers on non-Siri devices, and SpeakToIt Assistant, found in the iTunes App Store, is one of these.

What can SpeakToIt Assistant do?

I spent some time with SpeakToIt on both an old iPhone 3GS and my iPad 2 earlier today, and while it’s somewhat limited compared to Siri — more on that later — the $1.99 app can assist with certain tasks. Using the software, I was able to compose and send text messages and emails from my iPhone and my iPad; note that on the iPad, SpeakToIt appears as an iPhone app with support for pixel doubling.

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SpeakToIt Assistant can also search the web for various information. I asked it to search Amazon for a product and the results were spot on. A small window with results opens in the top half of the display, but with one tap, these can be expanded to a full screen. Other searchable items include images, maps, news, stock information, the IMDB site and weather nearby or around the world.

Search results take place quickly; in some cases faster than Siri. That could be due to more people using Apple’s software and servers versus those using SpeakToIt. You can customize the look of the assistant and turn conversation mode on or off.

Multiple skills, but not hooks into iOS

Also in the list of skills are features to organize events or your agenda, tasks, translate words or phrases from English and a calculator for basic math or conversion of currency or measures. I rely on Siri’s “what’s my day look like?” function on a daily basis, and a “what’s on my calendar?” query worked just fine. I first had to give the OK for SpeakToIt to see my Google Calendar; the app isn’t hooked into the native iOS Calendar software.

And if you allow SpeakToIt to access your Twitter or Facebook accounts, you can send tweets or update your status by voice. You can also check in to FourSquare, although I didn’t try that function yet. Tweets and status updates worked out really well in my tests; better than the email dictations I tried.

Limitations and voice input

Here’s where the limitations come in. Although SpeakToIs Assistant is powered by Nuance, the same as Siri, I found message dictation to be marginal at best for some reason. With Siri, I can speak multiple sentences, along with punctuation, and the text is perfect nearly every time. With SpeakToIt, even when trying to add punctuation, my dictations became giant run-on sentences without punctuation.

And although the app has a coversation mode, so that you don’t have to hit the microphone button for every command, it’s not quite as conversational as Siri. If you want to talk about weather in several places, that’s fine. But the process of creating a message ends with the message dictation. You have to manually send it by tapping the Send button.

Siri also has better native app integration as well. I tried to create a reminder with SpeakToIt assistant, but it could only do so with Evernote. No such luck setting an alarm with the native Clock app, either. This is where Siri shines: It’s integrated at a lower level with iOS than any third-party option likely ever will be.

Worth a try if you temper expectations

Still, SpeakToIt assistant shows promise as a $1.99 app, as I’d expect it to keep maturing and improving. Folks that don’t want to pay for the app just yet can take a free chance on Valentine’s Day: the software will be free to the first 100,000 people who download it, and $0.99 after that for the remainder of the day.

Last week, Arieso released a report stating iPhone 4S users were consuming twice the data as their iPhone 4 counterparts. Arieso placed the blame squarely on Siri, the new personal assistant that allows users to initiate searches and basic phone actions through voice command. Siri, however, is just a scapegoat. Siri may be the mechanism for more searches on the iPhone 4S, but the application itself consumes a miniscule amount of data.

I reached out to Vlad Sejnoha, CTO of Nuance Communications, which provides the automated voice recognition technology that powers Siri. Sejnoha said he couldn’t comment on Siri specifically, but generally, network voice recognition platforms send highly compressed audio files from the phone to network-based servers any time a voice command is initiated. Nuance’s own Dragon Go voice-search app usually only sends tens of kilobytes per voice prompt, and the amount of data sent back to the device is even tinier, since Dragon Go doesn’t have to futz around with an audio recording on the return path, Sejnoha said.

However, that doesn’t mean Siri isn’t driving more data usage even if it isn’t draining bandwidth itself. Sejnoha said voice-driven user interfaces and natural speech recognition are encouraging more and deeper searches for mobile web content simply because the technology is easier to use on the go than the usual finger-tap methods. If customers are using Siri to get to video sharing and streaming sites or using it to find applications to download more often and more easily, then you would expect a big increase in data usage.

“Invoking searches or media consumption may require greater bandwidth, but no more than if these actions were initiated in conventional ways, and the size of the data ‘payload’ can vary immensely depending on what the user is doing,” Sejnoha said in an email.

Still, it’s hard to imagine those Siri-driven searches are producing a doubling of data traffic to the 4S versus the iPhone 4. You can use Siri to easily get to YouTube or Pandora websites, but Siri can’t open the YouTube or Pandora iOS apps, which are infinitely more useful for actually streaming video and music. Many of Siri’s most tantalizing features – setting reminders, dictating text messages, initiating calls, getting weather and schedule updates – would consume only the most miniscule amount of network data. The bevy of new features in the iPhone 4S, from iCloud over-the-air music and data synchronization to its more powerful processor, all could be contributing to an explosion in data usage much more than Siri.

It’s more accurate to look at Siri as another of Apple’s long line of user interface innovations — the original iPhone touchscreen, the first Safari microbrowser and the concept of the mobile app – that have made it subsequently easier for smartphone users to interact with Internet services on a tiny device.

Nuance, which helps power Apple’s Siri, has been a leader in the space but has had to contend with rival Vlingo, which also has similar technology and has put out its own Siri-like personal assistant app. Nuance previously sued Vlingo for patent infringement, but a federal jury sided with Vlingo in August. The companies were apparently contemplating further litigation, but now that all falls to the wayside as the two put aside their differences to make money together. Nuance said the combined company will go after a $5 billion opportunity enabling phones, tablets, cars, televisions, navigation devices, music players and PCs with intelligent voice recognition and analysis.

Here’s what the two CEOs had to say. First, Mike Thompson of Nuance:

Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services. By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand.

Meanwhile, Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan downplayed the two companies past differences to focus on their common business model:

Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding. As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers.

It’s a sign of where the market for natural language interface and voice recognition is going. As the technology gets deployed in more apps, devices and machines, it’s about building up big systems that learn from all the utterances users make. For Nuance to continue to be a leader, it needs to keep adding technology and building on its database, developing more sophisticated techniques to parse speech and determine user intent, not just their words. Adding Vlingo helps Nuance build a more robust product as it goes up against systems from Google and Microsoft.

But the deal also means fewer options for developers and companies looking to incorporate a third-party solution into their systems. Now Nuance is in a position to become the main provider of voice processing and recognition to customers who don’t have the technology in-house.

]]>Siri went down on Thursday for its first extended outage — around five hours, according to most counts. That doesn’t seem like an exceedingly long outage (especially compared to the recent multiday service blackout for RIM’s BlackBerry devices), but it sparked many discussion threads and countless news articles. The tenor of much of the talk is that Apple made a major gaffe in allowing this to happen. But in fact, Apple might also want to reflect on this after the fact and pat itself on the back.

Of course, the outage was annoying and inconvenient, and hopefully Apple learned a valuable lesson about managing a large-scale, persistent data service managed from its own server facility, and this will never happen again. But the extent of the outcry as the outage wore on, as well as the attempts on Friday to follow up and try to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, show that Siri’s effect on the mobile landscape is not insignificant.

It could be the case that Apple’s servers couldn’t handle the demand that Siri was putting on the system, as some users who contacted Apple support about the problem were told. That would indicate that Apple underestimated the scale of demand for Siri, which suggests the personal assistant is being used a lot. But even if the problem is independent of demand, the fact that the news of Siri’s going down spread as far and as quickly as it did, and elicited so much response from the user community, indicates that it is finding a place in people’s lives. Some of the media attention could be attributed to the fact that people love when a winner like Apple stumbles, but user concern seems genuine.

When Apple first announced the personal assistant software, I admit to thinking that Siri had limited value beyond triggering an initial feeling of novelty that would fade quickly. After using Siri myself, I found that it actually had a lot of real use value, even in countries where it hasn’t yet gained localization features. The indignation of users affected by the outage indicates that I wasn’t the only one who found myself leaning on Siri a lot more heavily than I expected to.

It’s not as widespread, but the outcry about Siri’s downtime reminds me of the web-wide groans that go up every time the Twitter fail whale makes one of its visits or when Tumblr takes a tumble. That’s a minor PR problem for Apple in the short term, but in the larger picture, it’s a very good thing that people miss Siri when she’s not around.